In an age when virtually any radio broadcast can be “remote,” the very definition of a studio is changing — if there’s a studio at all.
This is one in a series about how stations are creating and managing their audio from anywhere, thanks to virtualization, cloud, IP and other technologies. This article is from the free ebook “Audio Production (From Anywhere).”
At Beasley Media Group’s music stations, on-air and production staffs increasingly work in distributed environments.
“They could be working from home,” said Director of Corporate Engineering Lamar Smith. “They can be working from a hotel room or working from a client’s location doing a remote broadcast. We have opened a realm that allows us to be able to work and easily generate content, recorded or live, from anywhere in the world and put it on the air.”
In one or two markets, Beasley even runs the cluster by feeding cloud-based content to the transmitter with no studio involved at all.
This migration is being executed with tools like WideOrbit’s Cloud automation system. But Smith said the company is “constantly looking for more opportunities” for putting operations into a cloud scenario — reducing reliance on hardware, data centers and studios and technical operation infrastructure. And this is also playing out in the back office.
“We are moving a lot of things — our DNS servers, our VPN servers, the servers that handle our business operation — to the cloud as well, running in AWS or Microsoft Azure, so we don’t have to maintain or buy hardware on a regular basis,” Smith said.
“Azure gives us a virtual drive,” said Al Schermeister, Beasley’s director of automation support.
“Somebody using music scheduling software with a connection to the Azure drive can drop the file there. It’s then processed by WideOrbit Cloud, which is in the AWS realm. The two are talking to each other, and we have no servers or computers at that location. Just drop it into a virtual drive, it gets sucked into the cloud and boom, you have your playlist for the next several days.”
A company VPN is not required, either. And Beasley can create user profiles and credentials that provide customized levels of access.
“A person can use their own computer if necessary; we don’t have to give them a company laptop and VPN access to our network,” Schermeister said.
“The cloud-based structure allows them to get to the link and interact with the radio client to do a show. This makes it a lot easier for instance if VPN goes out. As long as you have a good internet connection, you can access all this very simply.”
Lamar Smith said the transition does, however, require a bit of a shift in mindset for the users.
“Because they don’t have pieces of hardware in front of them anymore, they think they don’t have the ability to do things exactly the same way. But we’re actually giving them more tools, and they’re finding that it is easier and more efficient in the long run.”
The new environment helps Beasley manage cybersecurity concerns.
“We’re always concerned about security. Anybody who’s not is crazy,” Smith said.
“But we feel that we are a lot more secure than we ever were. The user’s computer becomes less of a concern because the mechanisms to send audio are so controlled compared to putting their laptop on our network and having access to everything there.”
The new approach also facilitates cloud voice tracking. Talent can pre-cut a show from anywhere. “This has really been a helpful tool,” Schermeister said.
And radio spots or other audio content can be created in Beasley’s “production pods” by creators working anywhere. They can place those completed files into virtual drives for access by the WideOrbit system.
This migration is most advanced at Beasley’s music stations, rather than its news and sports facilities.
“We are still doing sports with codecs in the traditional method, as we’ve done for the past 10 or 15 years, especially at sports stations in bigger markets that have more complexity,” Smith said.
“But we are excited about some of the opportunities this has opened up for us. We have a few stations that do local high school football, and we are looking forward to the ability to use our cloud product to be able to go to a football game anywhere, getting an internet connection from there — or taking our internet connection with us, with a Starlink dish — and being able to do a football game live, with full control over the radio station right from the football field,” he said.
“No ISDN or codecs. And you don’t need a board operator back in the studio anymore, it’s all taking place right there at the sporting events.”
One pleasant outcome of all this, Smith said, is that stations seem to be doing more live events again now that they can go without requiring a Marti, codecs or ISDN lines.
“We’re starting to go back to doing things live again. I think this is a huge improvement for the industry, and from the perspective of being ‘the information source for a community’ in an emergency, it opens the possibility for us to be able to grab a computer, go to the emergency center and do live content quickly and easily. There’s nothing difficult about it,” he said.
“The ability to be live more often, or when we need to be live, is exciting.”
